Threshold

Threshold. A piece of wood, metal, or stone that forms the bottom of a door. You walk over it as you enter a room. A house. Your life. It is a point of beginnings, endings. And changes.

In his stunning new collection of poems, Joseph O. Legaspi explores these liminal spaces, portals that we enter which transform our lives. It is a book that celebrates various courageous outsets across boundaries—bodily, filial, marital, even biblical. Threshold not only offers revelations from both sides of the passageway but tells of human endurance and our longing, our desires.

Joseph O. Legaspi, a Fulbright and New York Foundation for the Arts fellow, is the author of two poetry collections from CavanKerry Press, Threshold (2017) and Imago (2007); and three chapbooks: Postcards (Ghost Bird Press), Aviary, Bestiary (Organic Weapon Arts), and Subways (Thrush Press). His poems have appeared in POETRY, New England Review, World Literature Today, Best of the Net, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day. He co-founded Kundiman (www.kundiman.org), a national organization serving generations of writers and readers of Asian American literature. He lives with his husband in Queens, NY.

“Joseph O. Legaspi’s Threshold celebrates the wondrous space in which the masculine and feminine energies enrich and unnerve a young man’s path to a fully realized self, “immaculate / yet ravaged, tarnished yet holy.” These exquisite poems invite us to cross into the “periphery / of sanctuary and danger,” farther into the rooms of family and culture, in order to find nourishment in breath, beauty, desire, and love.”
– Rigoberto González

“I’m astonished by what these poems know. From boyhood initiation into beauty as artifice, to full embrace of self in union with a man, all is recalled with love and wonder. Nothing denied, Legaspi conjures the world in voluptuous detail, and the poet’s ‘disparaged humming body’ claims itself, exuberant and triumphant.”
– Joan Larkin

October 2017
88 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.25
$16
ISBN 978-1-933880-63-1